How do you make people feel? The importance of Intention in our interactions and four key hints for leaders who want better Impact.

As a leader, manager, colleague or supplier to other people, the personal impact that you have on others is perhaps the single biggest determinant of the quality of your relationship with them. And it’s that relationship which will make or break the success of what you’re trying to achieve.

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou

If you click the diagram at the top of this article you can download or save a copy. You’ll see that there’s two important aspects to the Impact that we have on other people:

Intention. This is about what we’re trying to achieve when we have an interaction with someone else;

Result. What outcome did we actually get (which might be different from our intention).

For great self-awareness, we need to be conscious of both of these aspects of our impact on others. This article is going to look at 1.Intention, and I’ll cover 2.Result in a later one.

I like to break it down into those two steps because we’re often operating on a kind of autopilot when it comes to our interactions with others. But the issue here is that you can’t not have an impact on another person. They WILL notice how you made them feel, even if it was that you made them feel nothing.

If your relationship is a purely transactional one, no emotional content, no ongoing interactions likely, no need to trade favours or if they’ve no choice about helping you, then I suppose you could safely skip all of this stage. But how many purely transactional relationships can you actually think of? For most of us, and I would argue most of the time, the personal impact that we have on someone, even when we’re just asking for a task to be done, is hugely important to getting those things done well.

So be very clear about what your intention is before you start an interaction, or before you respond to one.

Sometimes leaders need a bit of a framework for their personal interactions. Below you’ll find my simplified cheat-sheet for the kind of impacts that leaders should be looking to create whenever they have an interaction with someone.

To boost your own self-awareness of the impact you have on others, start being really conscious about the intentions behind your interactions. The key question to answer is this:

“As I interact with [person], as well as the ‘transactional’ reason for doing so, what kind of impact do I want to have on them?”

I would argue that any leader should be intending to have one of these four impacts in each of their interactions with others:

to have them experience clarity and direction

to have them be inspired

to have them feel nurtured, cared-for or looked-after

to have them be empowered and be growing.

How about you, what impact do you intentionally want to have in your next interaction?